Personalities

Your personalities will appear in the sidebar. Click one to edit its details. When you are done editing, click the Save personality button at the top or the bottom of the page to update your personality.

Personality options

Each personality has a number of options associated with it:

Display Name — The personality display name is for your reference and is what appears in the dropdown menu on the compose screen. It does not appear in sent emails in any way.

Full Name and Email address — The name and email address that the email will appear to come from. This is what appears in the From header of emails you send.

If you specify *@domain.tld for a personality, then you will be able to specify something different to replace the * with for each individual message that you send.

Reply-To address — If set, we'll add this value as the Reply-To header on emails you send. When a recipient replies to the email, it should go to this address rather than the From address. Leave this blank unless you explicitly want replies to go to a different address.

SMTP force From — This is only available for your default personality. When ticked, we will rewrite your From address to match this personality whenever you send via SMTP, no matter what the email client sets.

BCC address(es) — A Bcc copy of every email you send from this personality will be sent to the email addresses you specify here.

BCC on SMTP — If ticked, a Bcc copy of every email you send via SMTP with a From email address matching this personality will also be sent to the BCC address(es).

Signature — The signature to automatically insert into your new messages from this personality.

Sent Items — The folder in which you wish to save a copy of each message you send with this personality, or None if you don't wish to save a copy of your sent messages.

Save sent files — If not ticked, your copy of messages you send will not include any attachments you sent with the message.

Sent Items on SMTP — If ticked, a copy will also be saved to the Sent Items folder when you send an email via SMTP with a From email address matching this personality. Attachments will always be included with the message in this case, regardless of the Save sent files option.

Most IMAP email clients support uploading messages to a Sent folder, but because SMTP and IMAP are separate, this means uploading the exact same message twice, once to send via SMTP, and once to upload to the Sent folder. With this option, the email will only be uploaded once, saving time and bandwidth (make sure you turn off the saving of sent messages in your client of course, otherwise you will end up two copies).

Some clients are buggy with regard to uploading to the Sent folder, Thunderbird being known to have intermittent problems. Using the personality approach should be more reliable.

If you use POP instead of IMAP, then there is generally no way to upload the email to the Sent folder on the server.

Use for vacation replies — Only emails sent to personalities with this option ticked will receive automated vacation replies.

Send via external SMTP server — Normally when you send email, the email will be sent via the FastMail server. From there, we find the appropriate server for each recipient of the email, and forward it on to that server directly.

However, if the domain of the email address is not hosted with FastMail, you probably want to send via that domain's SMTP server if possible to ensure your messages are delivered reliably (see the note below on SPF issues).

External server — the SMTP server name to send through (e.g. smtp.example.com).

External port — the port to connect to on the SMTP server. Usually 587, or 465 if using "SSL/TLS encrypted" security.

External security — the type of security to use when connecting to the SMTP server.

External username — the username (normally your email address) to use to log in to the SMTP server.

External password — the password to use to log in to the SMTP server.

Extra tips and tricks.

If you just want to use a personality for BCC on SMTP or Sent Items on SMTP, you can put a * in the email address on either side of the @ to make it match anything. For instance, *@fastmail.com will match any @fastmail.com email address you send with. If you have a personality with a specific email address that matches a From address, that will take precedence; * matches will only occur as a fallback.

For use within the web interface, it's not meaningful to use personalities which have a * in the domain part: you'll probably just end up with a bounced email.

Personalities and SPF

SPF was an attempt to reduce spam by stopping people forging the domain in the SMTP MAIL FROM envelope of sent email.

Unfortunately SPF has not reduced spam at all because: a) no user ever sees the SMTP MAIL FROM envelope, so it doesn't stop spammers forging the From header users see in emails, and b) anyone can setup SPF on any domain they own, and SPF doesn't tell you which domains to actually trust.

Whether the SPF checks pass or fail has little correlation with whether a message is spam or not. We can see this in the SpamAssassin scores, which show that SPF failures have quite a low score.

Additionally, SPF breaks the simple forwarding of emails between systems, and requires a separate system called SRS to rewrite the SMTP MAIL FROM envelope and to forward bounces back through the forwarding system.

Despite that, some systems treat SPF failures as a sign of spaminess, so you may want to make sure your sent emails pass SPF tests. If you are sending email with a From address from a domain that's not hosted with FastMail and doesn't have specific SPF records authorising our servers, you should send via that domain's SMTP server instead, using the External SMTP server option.